CS2013 Exemplar-Fest

A set of course exemplars showcased at the SIGCSE-13 "CS2013 Exemplar-Fest" are now available here.

CS2013 Course and Curriculum Exemplars

During the development of CS2013, the Steering Committee sought exemplars of courses and curricula from the broader community. This open process connected the CS2013 Body of Knowledge to real, existing approaches representing diverse and innovative ways to teach computer science. In computer science terms, the topics and learning outcomes in the Body of Knowledge represent a specification, whereas a curriculum is an implementation and a course is part of a curriculum.

Including exemplars as part of the CS2013 effort is a new idea not present in previous versions of the ACM/IEEE-CS computer science curriculum guidelines. The steering committee believes they will provide greater value than stylized model courses that do not directly describe actual experience.

To give a full sense of the diverse ways to teach the material in the Body of Knowledge, CS2013 includes several dozen course exemplars. Additionally, CS2013 also includes a number of exemplars describing full curricula. Although the CS2013 Final Report has already been released, the templates for both course and curricular exemplars are still available (below) for those wishing to map their courses and/or curricula against the CS2013 Body of Knowledge.

Course Exemplar Template

For individual courses, we have created a text-based template (MSWord) to facilitate collecting the desired information. Specifically, the template asks for information that situates the course in your curriculum context and that provides detail on course content and pedagogic rationale. We believe that filling out the template should take about half an hour if you know the course well.

Curricular Exemplar Template

For a full curriculum, we have created a spreadsheet that allows you to indicate which of your courses contain topics that address the core curriculum learning outcomes.
We anticipate this task would be most easily accomplished by having a coordinator who solicits input from the faculty members responsible for teaching the associated courses.